Guild Wars 2

Before I say why I stopped (I count as people too!), I’ll say why I got it:
- I’ve had GW1 since 2005. I consider it one of the best MMO’s I’ve played. It’s got a special place for me.
- While following GW2s development, it looked like it had a lot of promise. A lot of good, interesting ideas. It looked fun!
- ArenaNet was showing signs of being a good developer, one you can trust.

I played through the beta, and pre-ordered it because so far, it looked good and I wanted to support ArenaNet. Then I played it for a month or two post-release, felt extremely tired of it. Took a half-year break. Played it, got a war to 80. Did sPvP. Did some more area completion, daily achieves…even did the living world thing with the Canthan airship. That was cool. And the Super Box.

But I played less and less – eventually I just stopped, and here’s why:

- The combat’s dumbed down with no proper resource management, just spam your skills all day long. And all the intricacies just kind of go whoosh out of the window the moment you realize you’re better off running a faceroll DPS build and bi-winning the game. Even Dark Souls with its left/right click combat is far deeper due to the nuances in individual items/character building, as well as stuff like active blocking/parrying/backstabbing/dodging.

And I can legitimately bring up DaS’ system here because they are similar in a few key aspects, such as visual cue based combat – active dodging/movement/positioning – “hack-and-slasher” derived attacks (DaS with clicking, GW2 with spammy hotkeys). OH, ALSO. DaS doesn’t fill the screen with particle maelstroms! Holy kitten. GW2 is like a laser light show, except cranked up to 200 and right in my face.

- The build system in PvE/WvW is highly inconvenient. No templates? Why? And having to rush back to an NPC to switch out my traits is clunky. The lack of build flexibility in terms of skills makes me sad. GW1 buildcrafting was a ton more fun than what we have now.

- ANet touted “a sense of permanence” with traits – I see none of that. And this isn’t Baldur’s Gate or KOTOR. This is an MMO, with a very weak, weak story, which is extremely cringe-worthy in the later half of the game and makes me question why ANet even mentioned it during development. My character doesn’t even really feel like my character in a large portion of the story. It feels like it’s been possessed by a Stupidity Demon.

- The story. Ohh the story. The Living World can go tumble off a cliff into a pit full of Mindblade Spectres. I’m not going to spend more time on this, because outside of some lore tidbits that are genuinely cool, it’s very weak and contrived.

- The “open world” nature. At first I thought this could be cool, you know? A sense of adventure and size – you pack up your stuff at the Black Citadel and off you go, marching across the lands, meeting strangers and doing events with them! Hell, you can even find hamlets to craft food and armor/weapons at to equip yourself as you level up!

Until I played the game and found that the most profitable events are zerg fests and the least profitable ones are empty. But that’s more my own naivete, right? Which is why I miss the highly instanced nature of GW1. Do you realize just how much cooler ANet could’ve made zones, mobs and bosses with this new technology/engine, had they made zones smaller and allowed only like teams of 5 into them? We could’ve even, maybe, just maybe, gotten boss fights like the ones in Shadow of the Colossus. Man…I’m going to daydream for a bit.

…Oh, right. Where did the modular nature of armor go? GW1 had a great system: insignias and runes define your armor function/stat effect, whereas the armor piece itself just had a defense value. That would mean I’d be at greater liberty to tart my character up and really add my own taste to its appearance, because I was not as badly limited by transmutation stones and armor grind.

Anyway – even with heavy instancing we get back to the issue of “no one plays together” because some zones will be abandoned (inevitably). But GW1 wound up with heroes – who I miss now, since unless I’m in a guild, playing gets extremely lonely. And I can’t just summon people on my friends list either. Speaking of which…

- Transferring and guesting. I may be out of date, but can we still not guest to servers in a different continent? We could switch between U.S/European servers at will in GW1. Anyway; transferring costs as much as a brand new game. I can get wanting to deter constant population switching, but what, 40 Euros? Isn’t that overkill?

- I arrived at the conclusion that ANet is just out of touch with the game. Going through the forums, lurking and looking at posts; trying to filter out both the apologists and the extreme whiners, makes me feel like either the staff just gave up or got tired of working on this game, or they’ve got a Roomba doing all their work by riding around on keyboards.

Okay, so, as a preface, this suggestion is probably going to be hilariously bad since I’m on a Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon rush, but bear with me.

The idea is to replace the Mortar elite which seems like is not practical, and demands you stand still which you don’t want to be doing as any class in GW2, right? So, why not have a Personal Gatling Gun? Charr already have those, and obviously it wouldn’t be the hellstorm that a modern day minigun is.

Anyway; It would obviously function as a Kit. As for roles it would be focused on damage and control.

Skill #1: Repeater – this is the unexciting main autoattack. The idea is that it would fire faster than the Rifle with a reasonably low damage-per-hit, so as to not make it an inescapable death machine. Easier said than done, I know. Or perhaps it could be a chain? Single Shot – Double Shot – Triple Shot, with consistent damage “per bullet”.

Skill #2: Spray – an obvious second choice. This would be a channeled skill that sprays in a cone. It would knock foes back, depending on how close they are to you. The skill could have a 15 – 20 sec cd for that reason.

Skill #3: Rocket Propelled Shell – Fire a single shot that knocks down and adds vulnerability. Moderate dmg. 30 sec cd. Can be traited to Burn?

Skills 4 and 5 are where it differs a bit because these are “Modes”, which apply unique Gatling-gun specific buffs for X amount of time and are removed when the gun is unequipped.

Skill #4: Gauss Mode – Basically inferno rounds. Your gatling gun, for 25 seconds, gains increased range, your rounds burn upon hit, but all your other Gatling Gun cooldowns are increased by 2s except Skill 5. Activating this skill with an enemy targeted pulls them backwards. Upon switching out of this mode, Gauss Mode goes on cooldown for 3s.

Skill #5: Terminator Mode – Your rounds have a 50% chance to cause a lightning strike that chains up to 2 foes near your target. Your range is shortened, but your Gatling Gun cooldowns are 25% shorter. Additionally, you have a 25% chance to inflict vulnerability with your Gatling Gun skills. Activating this skill with an enemy targeted cripples them. Upon switching out of this mode, Terminator Mode goes on cooldown for 3s.

The idea with this is to basically punish enemies for lumping up in a zerg and displace them. And if anyone gets away, you can bean them from a further range.

It does seem a bit like it duplicates the Flamethrower -to an extent-, as both are control/damage weapons and the Gatling has less utility at first sight. But this is a first draft suggestion!

I hope you liked it. If not, well. Aw. :c

And just as I picked up my Engineer again last night and got him to 30 then came on here to find advice. :c

Rifle Turret:
25% chance to put down a rifle turret
65% chance to put down a rifle
10% chance to gain swiftness

While it sounds nice, it does make me worry about what it will do to peoples’ processors/GPUs on high population servers unless the calculations are done locally, and not server-side (don’t quote me on this). Linking it to real-world forecasts would, I assume, be a fair pain to implement too.

Also, as to the Shenmue inspiration – bear in mind Shenmue was a single player game. Different kettle of fish when you bring servers and clients into the mix.

+1 for cyrillic.

Bear in mind that not all of us have high or upper mid range PCs, too (and for a uni student, that’s not likely to get updated that soon either), so having to port back to somewhere else just for that 1 thing will consume additional time due to longer loading times (I spend at least a couple of minutes or more waiting for an area to load up, depending on population count). I figure I’m in the minority with this, though. :/

But the idea of being able to respec on the fly and save/load builds is IMO something that really ought to come back.

It honestly made preparing for just about anything in GW1 that did need a different build actually pleasant, and build prototyping became a fun side activity as a result. And the respec cost is silly since it’s absolutely negligible. It basically has no point existing at high levels and for newer players it will discourage experimentation to a degree.

Warning: wall of text ahead. TL;DR: Too much work. WvW already does it. Nonsensical lore changes (ref: Nightfall, Kormir, Palawa Joko). Whiny whine whine.

Preface: If anything seems aggressive in this post, then it’s not intended as such. Read it in the voice of someone who has gone through lobotomy.

We thoroughly oblivion’d Abbadon at the end of Nightfall. His power was absorbed by Kormir kitten thief. I wanted the power for myself!) entirely. Unless ANet turns around and pulls a deus ex machina out of nowhere.

Besides; if by “new race” you mean “completely new visuals, new voice work (gotta have a kitten voice right?), new animation sets, new racial skills, etc.” along with a mess of new territory to explore…the amount of work, and moreover costs – game development isn’t cheap, and neither is making extended content – makes me skeptical.

But if you mean that the new race thing isn’t all of that, then it’ll just seem very token. Mind you, even if it just entailed swapping skins around, that’s still a lot of work due to the amount of morph combinations you get. Besides, we already have Palawa Joko in Elona. Let’s deal with him first, yeah?

Now, as for the idea of “reverting” – that’s a pretty limiting and discouraging factor from a game design standpoint. Let me explain…

If you tell a player that the way they can be this awesome new race is by doing a mission or several, and then getting stuck in the new play area and unable to revisit old ones (and their friends) on that char, which might be their only one – then you’re basically denying them a large chunk of the content that they worked & paid for.

So you say make another char? What if I don’t wish to? HYPOTHETICALLY say I have a level 80 with all the best stuff, without using the gem store, with say…a max of 24 hours a week playtime. A somewhat casual play schedule, since it’s just approx. 3 hours each day. The amount of work and time invested in this case would cause the customers perception to turn that molehill into a mountain, trust me.

However, if it was possible to go back and forth via map travel like it was in GW1 when you moved between continents, then that’d be okay. Sort of. But this ties into my next point…

You’re essentially bringing light PvP into PvE. WvWvW already does that. That’s why we have PvE separated from WvW and PvP. It’s like in Dark Souls where you can randomly get invaded and lose all your progress, forcing you to clear the entire area again. It’s just really asinine, and if I wanted brutal difficulty I’d play Dark Souls, not GW2. :P

It sounds like these ideas were more the birth of a sudden, really cool idea. They look like something you’d find in the first initial draft of a game design doc.

That’s my two cents, anyway. I apologize if I came off as abrasive.

Ahoy, as the title says I’m looking for a guild to join and play among. I’ve currently only got characters below level 20(most are 17) since I haven’t really been playing too many games recently, but I’m getting back into the swing of things now.

I’ve got 5 characters(guardian, warrior, thief, engineer, ranger), but I have a habit of leaning towards supportive playstyles in games(failing that, close ranged). I used to play the original Guild Wars starting from the summer of 2005, so I’ve got a pretty long history with this game series(so if nothing else, I’ve got a large baggage of lore knowledge :P).

I figure I would fit better in a casual guild. I have no issues with server transfers.

EDIT: Oh, yes. I’m also apt at stealing flags from silly Blood Eagles. >:c